Late Night Classics – Sleepwalkers

When I was a kid there were only two careers that I aspired to: a professional athlete or a film journalist. While I fell way short of being the next football or basketball star, movies have ruled my life since day one and I couldn’t be happier than I am now getting the opportunity to meet my heroes.

I have always been a fan of filmmaker Mick Garris and ironically his beginnings are where I am right now. He started out visiting movie sets and interviewing the biggest and best names in the field of horror. One day I would like to take what I do here at Killer Film and take it to the next level and move these retrospectives to a grander scale and do them on film.

Mick Garris has been Stephen King’s right hand man for some time now. It’s an amazing story how Mick rose to the upper echolon of genre directors by working with the ‘King of Horror’ on The Stand, The Shining, Quicksilver Highway, Riding the Bullet, and Desperation. Mick Garris and I look back at his 1992 breakout flick Sleepwalkers, and I have to say that this is one of the most entertaining one-on-one’s I’ve done.

Jason Bene: When did you first meet Stephen King?

Mick Garris: The first time I actually met him was at a signing years ago at a science fiction bookstore in Santa Monica way back when. It wasn’t really meeting him, it was just, “Hi, would you sign this?” and ”Would you be on my Z Channel interview show if you ever get the chance?” That must have been 1980 or something like that. The first time I really met him when I was hired to do Sleepwalkers. We talked over the phone and I never really met him until he came to the set to do his cameo.

Jason Bene: This was the first time Stephen King wrote a screenplay expressly for the big screen. For an up and coming director that must have been exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.

Mick Garris: It was all of the above. It didn’t come from him. He had director approval and I met with the people at Columbia Pictures. This was my first studio picture, but I had written a couple of movies before that and I had directed independently, Critters 2: The Main Course and some television. My agents convinced Columbia that it might be a good match and I met with them and they said, “Oh, this is great. We love this. We just have to meet with one other director. As a courtesy to the agents and all we have to do that.” They hired the other director but they had creative differences and they ended up letting that director go when he wanted to take it something off-field to what King had written. That was my first opportunity to come in after they had dropped the other director and King had approved me after seeing Psycho IV: The Beginning. That was what led to me being hired. He was just the last step in the hiring process because people seem to forget when they put into a contract that somebody has a director’s approval. That’s one that he exercised and it turned out for me to be a wonderful relationship, and hopefully for him to work with somebody who respected his work as much as I did.

Jason Bene: Were there any changes made to the script? Was Columbia Pictures worried about the incestuous relationship between the mother and son?

Mick Garris: There were some changes made. Originally there weren’t any issues about that and maybe that’s one of the reasons why I was hired because of those issues in Psycho IV. Some of the changes that were made had nothing to do with. I had written a new beginning for it and a scene where you see the Sleepwalker in the mirror during the lovemaking sequence was something that I had come up with on my own. Then King had done some tweaking. There was a change in the studio administration. The head of the studio when I was hired was let go during production and the new head of the studio came in and said, “Well, no mother and son are going to have sex in any movie as long as I’m at the head of the studio.” And then he got canned before it came out. He was right, but it didn’t mean that we changed it from there, it was just the opposite.

Jason Bene: Would you say in some ways that this movie is a variation on the vampire tale, but instead of blood being sucked it’s the lifeforce that is being drawn out? It made me think of Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce.

Mick Garris: It’s definitely got it roots in the vampire legend, but like you said it is sucking the lifeforce rather than the red, wet lifeforce that’s within each of us. In particular, a virgin’s lifeforce. A virginal female’s lifeforce to be feed to mother by son. It’s a vampire story with a different twist. I’m a big fan of Tobe’s Lifeforce, by the way.

Jason Bene: It’s an underrated film.

Mick Garris: It is. It’s out of its mind, but that’s a good thing.

Jason Bene: The 80′s were about going over the top and I think the film captured the time very well.

Mick Garris: It’s true. It’s very true. In the case of Sleepwalkers I liked that it is Norman Rockwell goes to hell. This idealized, Leave it to Beaver image of what small town America is like. Much like finding an ear in Blue Velvet; on the lawn, under the sprinkler, in this cozy Americana setting is much darker stuff afoot there. I love seeing the idea of America that maybe never really existed.

Jason Bene: You were dealing with a movie that had a lot of cats. Were PETA and The Humane Society over your shoulder the entire time?

Mick Garris: I was over my shoulder because I’m a big animal guy. I have moments of guilt in that regard because in the scene outside of the Brady house where there are all of those cats sitting there and waiting, we had harness’ that attached them to the ground in a place you couldn’t see. The cats were amazing. They were well trained and very sweet. We did have The Humane Association on-set all of the time, but we didn’t really need them because I was there. They had put together eight specialty cats to play Clovis and each one with a special expertise. One was good at hissing. One was good at running. It ended up that we had one that was so good it did everything. There are maybe one or two shots that is one of the other specialty cats, but this one cat was amazing. I’m more of a dog guy, but any animal is okay by me. This cat was like a dog. It was affectionate, smart, responsive, and liked the direction as opposed to turning up its nose.

Jason Bene: The police officer who owns Clovis always cracks me up. Was that comic relief improvised or was that part of the script? That guy is funny every time he comes on the screen.

Mick Garris: Dan Martin is great. I’ve worked with him a couple of times. He’s also in The Stand. He’s a favorite actor of mine. Some of it was improv and some of it was scripted. “Hit the bad guy, hit the bad guy!” That was stuff that Dan had improvised and that was great. We wanted to have fun with it. We knew that it was a preposterous storyline, but we wanted to play it as straight as possible. We wanted to have a good time, too.

Jason Bene: Sleepwalkers is in some ways linked to ’The General’ segment of Cat’s Eye where the cat is the hero, but instead of a Sleepwalker you have this little gnome or gremlin who tries to steal the breath of Drew Barrymore. Those two projects are like companion pieces.

Mick Garris: That is true. It’s interesting because everytime I’ve seen King in his home environment he had a dog and no cats. I thought that was quite interesting. He does seem to be a cat guy in the movies.

Jason Bene: Music plays a key role in Sleepwalkers. How much of that has to do with your background as the lead singer of the band the ‘Horsefeathers Quintet’?

Mick Garris: Well, it was never called the ‘Horsefeathers Quintet’. It was a five piece band called ‘Horsefeathers’. Music has always been important to me and Nicholas Pike’s first theatrically released feature score was for Critters 2. He’s great. And to have a movie based on a song title by Santo & Johnny [Sleep Walk] using that as the theme of the movie was great. Music has always been important to me in that regard. I love an orchestral score and we were able to do for this, which you don’t normally get on one of the studios lower end budgetary movies. Music is so important and it’s a huge part of a genre film. When you’re trying to create suspense and tension, music is an incredibly important part and using acoustic instruments in an orchestral score was really important to me for this. It was great when we were recording it at the Columbia soundstage at the time because the musicians were thrilled because in 1992 they were using less and less orchestral scores. They just loved the detail and the richness. They said, “This is for a horror movie?”

Jason Bene: I was always a sucker for the casting of Mädchen Amick, probably because she reminded me of my girlfriend from college. I love the scene where she dances around with a vacuum cleaner in my favorite revival theater [Aero Theater] in Los Angeles.

Mick Garris: It was really fun to do. I wanted to try and do it all in one take; from the top of the theater marquee going down inside and then tracking with her until the final jump. Most of its that way, but you always cover yourself just to be sure. That theater is great and it’s now part of the American Cinematheque. It’s interesting because now they ask me to moderate Q & A’s when they do horror revivals. I’m doing one on August 14 with Tobe Hooper [The Funhouse and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre]. We’ve done them there before with Wes [Craven] and with Tobe. It’s like going back to the scene of the crime.

Jason Bene: I already have my ticket. I haven’t see The Funhouse in a theater since it first came out in 1981. Another underrated Tobe film that is pretty damn scary.

Mick Garris: Tobe’s work is really terrific and it all has to do with how good the script is. If he’s got a good script he makes a terrific movie. I think some of the stuff he did with us on Masters of Horror is some of the best stuff he’s ever done. It’s very exciting.

Jason Bene: The Damned Thing and Dance of the Dead are both great.  I think a lot of the guys did good work because they weren’t working underneath a studio and they were shooting independently in Canada – you got to do your own thing.

Mick Garris: It was completely independently made and I was able to give all of those directors complete creative control. They had final cut and they did everything the way they wanted to do it.

Jason Bene: I miss that show. Everytime I see you I bug you about it. It should have had a Tales from the Crypt kind of run.

Mick Garris: It could have. Showtime wanted it back for a third season. In the first season Anchor Bay was owned by IDT and they really supported the show and loved it. It was very successful for them. Then with the second season Anchor Bay was bought by Starz, and Starz was more corporate and they were more interested in immediate money coming back. The show played all around the world and was very successful, but Starz decided after season two that they didn’t want to go on. Showtime was happy to do another season, but then Lionsgate bought it and they upped the license price and they sold it to NBC [Fear Itself] and that was not a good sign for the future.

Jason Bene: Right around the time you were making Sleepwalkers a new technique came to the forefront called morphing. Can you talk about using that and how you balanced the effects between traditional make-up and morphing?

Mick Garris: It was a great tool. While we were making it T2 [Terminator 2: Judgment Day] came out, so I had never seen any morphing until we were already in production on the film and already designing how we were going to do these transformations. I was working with Tony Gardner and John Landis had made the Black or White video for Michael Jackson that did some brilliant morphing work in there. We were working with some of the same people who did the visual effects for Black or White. It was a really great, exciting new tool for us to go to stage A and stage C and not have to go through all of the other letters to get there by building every part in between. It is a great tool that you don’t want to overuse. I think one of the great things about Jurassic Park is that they wrote the script then made the movie from the script, rather than come up with an effects design. They made the script that was the book. You use a little restraint otherwise your outmoded in three years. It was just used as transitional stuff and we wanted to make it amazing because nobody had ever seen things change into something without a cut before. It was great to be able to do that. I think the car stuff is particularly successful. The face stuff ranges from really cool to I’ve seen that a million times.

Jason Bene: A little trivia about Sleepwalkers that I never knew until recently is that Tanya’s parents are the same actors who portrayed Ferris Bueller’s parents in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Mick Garris: [Laughs] They are indeed. It was intended to be Ferris Bueller’s parents, we thought it would be interesting to get them back together because Cindy Pickett was really married to Lyman Ward. It is a bit of trivia. There were real life husband and wife at the time. We weren’t long after the 80′s, so it was time to play with that.

Jason Bene: I thought Innocent Blood held the record for cameos, then in the same year you topped it. You have Mark Hamill, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Tobe Hooper, Joe Dante, John Landis, and even your wife [Cynthia Garris] shows up. How did you get all of those people together?

Mick Garris: All of those guys are really good friends of mine. I had been working with Clive at the time. We were working on projects that never came through. Tobe has been a good friend since I was a publicist working on Poltergeist and we met on the set. Joe Dante, I had a cameo in The Howling before there was ever any reason for me to have a cameo. Those friendships go way back. King was going to be coming out to visit the set for the first time and I talked him into playing a part. What I thought was not just having those guys [King, Barker, Hooper] in the same scene, but to have them all in the same shot. It’s a fun thing for the real horror genre fans to be able to see them as long as it’s not too distracting.

Jason Bene: For Innocent Blood John Landis brought in Dario Argento, Tom Savini, Steve Johnson, Sam Raimi, Frank Oz, Forry Ackerman, Linnea Quigley, and Don Rickles. Were you guys having a dueling cameo contest?

Mick Garris: John is the director friend that I’ve know longer than anybody. His office was next door to mine when I was answering phones for the original Star Wars as a receptionist and he was prepping Animal House. That’s where we met. I’m one of the zombies in Thriller. He’s in The Stand and he’s in Sleepwalkers. It’s always fun to get John in there. John is really the guy who started the whole director cameo thing.

Jason Bene: Maybe because of all of these cameos is the reason Masters of Horrors came to be. I would love to be a fly on the wall at one of the legendary Masters of Horror dinners that you throw.

Mick Garris: It’s kind of how those dinner came about. The show came out of the dinners, but the dinners came about because we would constantly be running into each other at comventions or film festivals or things like this because directors don’t work together. People would always say we should get together and have a dinner or something. Everybody would say that’s a good idea then nobody would do it. I realized if I don’t do it nobody’s going to. That’s how that came together and everybody had such a good time. We still do them every couple of months.

Jason Bene: Is it true that Guillermo Del Toro came up with the name?

Mick Garris: He did. The very first one had twelve of us and Guillermo was one of them. It was at a restaurant called Cafe Bizou in Sherman Oaks [California] and we were next to somebody who was having a birthday, so their table started singing happy birthday and all of us joined in. Afterwards Guillermo stands up and says, “The Masters of Horror wish you a Happy Birthday!” We took that name on from that point on.

Jason Bene: Are there any anecdotes or anything you wanted to share?

Mick Garris: There’s not a whole lot of anecdotes. When you are making a movie there is no time for the fun stuff. The only thing I can think of off hand besides from working with one hundred and twenty-six cats is the day that King was coming out for his cameo. He was only going to be there for a couple of hours because of his schedule. I was having my morning granola at the crafts services table and my tooth broke in half. I had to rush down to a dentist and have an emergency crown put on. King was like, “I got to get back to shoot this scene!” He never knew about it. He was there a grand total of two hours.

Jason Bene: What is the status of Bag of Bones?

Mick Garris: Bag of Bones is well underway. We have a great screenplay for a four hour mini-series. There is a little bit of instability at ABC right now. They just let go the head of production there last week. I don’t know what is going to come of that. We are ready to go and it’s a great, great script by Matt Venne, who wrote the Pelts episode of Masters of Horror. This is his favorite book and he really did a fantastic job. It’s a very emotional script as well as being genuinely frightening. It’s really passionate. Matt did a fantastic job. I’ve been trying to make this movie for three and a half years now. Hopefully we won’t keep getting sidetracked.There is some other stuff in the works. I’m putting together a series of low budget features that is getting close to fruition. Post Mortem is the hobby that keeps me busy in between.

There is a reason why Mick’s company is called ‘Nice Guy Productions’, he’s a true gentlemen. Thank you for the interview and the best of luck to you on your ongoing web series Post Mortem, where fans can check out Mick picking the brains of the likes of Roger Corman, Robert Englund, Rick Baker, and Wes Craven.